American Paradise of Christianity

Lets say we removed all non Christians from and area of the US. What do you suppose would happen? I think Christians have some crazy notion that everything would be just peachy. Life would be paradise! There would be no violence, no differences and peace for all. Right? Does history show otherwise? Without something for them to disagree on would they slowly divide and destroy themselves over time? What do you think would happen?

The real interesting question is whether or not Catholics would still be around. The fundies do not consider Catholics to be Christian - and other sects face this problem as well. Would the Mormons be around? I mean, they do believe in Jesus, even if they happen to think he was an astronaut.

I guess, if you take out Atheists, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus - the Christian world view just gets tighter and increases in resolution. I'm thinking the big rift would be between Catholics and 'other' because of the authority of the pope. Rather than crying about removal of the ten commandments from public spaces, there would be public argument about images of the virgin Mary.

What's funny is I will sometimes hear Catholics say things like "Catholics and Christians" thereby implicitly conceding the point to the fundies. But I suspect the average prod fundie would really decide the Mormons are worse than the Catholics.

And don't forget that about a third of the population of Germany died during the 30 years war, which was a Protestant/Catholic conflict.

And that even as late as 1960, a presidential candidate's Catholicism was a big concern in the United States. So Heather and Rich's point is a good one. The presence of all these "oddball" (from the Xian point of view) things like Islam, Buddhism, new Age, and so forth has served to make Xians forget their differences with each other, but with them all gone, the arguments can begin, with the resolution higher (to use Heather's metaphor).

Or heck, maybe they'd rediscover the first amendment and agree to disagree.

There has been fighting amongst christian groups for as long as there have been christian religions, removing those whose beliefs fall into the non-christian category wouldn't change that fact one iota.

Lets not forget another major consequence if this did happen, namely how far america would then fall behind in the sciences as nearly every noble prize winner has been an atheist and the majority of scientists and university proffesors are also atheists . At the forefront of the sciences and technology the amount of atheists far far exceeds that which you would expect from our percentage of the overall population

Maybe they'd bring back biblical punishment and stone people to death for working on the sabbath or for committing adultery. I wonder if they'd still love their scripture so much. I think it's ironic how they try to bring modern democracy to the Middle East while the US is becoming more and more backwards.

If it was segregated based on actual belief and obedience to biblical law then America would revert back to stone age medicine and science (partially). There would be very little public policy disputes as everyone would have to agree due to strict adherence to the bible on all matters.

If the segregation was based on people who give themselves the label 'christian' then little would change save for the massive loss of scientists, engineers, and doctors (aka the educated). The political spectrum would probably shift a little to the right.

I think history of the world is a good example of a predominantly religious society and is probably a good proxy for how a purely religious society would act. Probably not much differently from that of today with tendency towards regressive social policies. Rises in public atheism is a relatively new phenomenon, so I don't think its hard to imagine a world without them.

What would be more interesting would be speculating as to how a purely Atheistic society would act. The political spectrum I think would remain largely intact, except without the religious ideology plaguing the right of current American politics. Scientific and evidence based reasoning might be favored over emotional and traditional based reasoning. Such a society would be difficult to make predictions for though. As it stands currently, Atheists tend to be more critically minded as they challenge the status quo, and thus more rational and logical (on average). If the status quo was atheistic, then that selection would no longer be relevant.

I just commented on a youtube video of Pastor Dennis Terry, introducing Rick Santorum, and releasing a hail of crap about "if you are not christian get the hell out!".

The more I listen to Christians the more I think that they actually believe that this country was founded on Christian principals. Despite the fact that the first ammendments "Establishment Clause" and "Free Excercise clause" does away with all the nonsense.

If it was only christians they eventually would weed out the weaker denominations until all that was left was one theocracy operating just like the fundies in the middle east. Christians love to say that Islam is now where christianity was in the middle ages. They give themselves too much credit...

Just look at the different sects of Christianity. If their beliefs were based on the word of a perfect being, there would be no sects since the word of a god would be perfect enough to keep the belief system unified. However, this isn't the case since there are various ways of interpreting the biggest selling book of myths known as the Bible. So they would further divide, kill each other over their beliefs of a loving god and the Redeemer of Mankind, Jesus Christ. Humans are just chest beating apes still and that won't disappear for a very long time.

Whenever some cracker at the Georgia state guvment (sic), talks, it is all about this being a Christian nation. So, the Cretins of Christ say that only Christians should be able to obtain a sticker reading "In God We Trust" for free because it's their belief, and so it's different from any other citizen who wants a special sticker. And then they repeat the nonsense about the founding fathers blah-blah-blah. In other words, a special privilege for fundamentalist theology.